Retail establishments commonly use point of sale or other transaction terminals, such as cash registers, to allow customers of those establishments to purchase items.
As an example, in a conventional department store, supermarket or other retail establishment, a customer collects items for purchase and places the items in a shopping cart, basket, or simply carries them to a point of sale terminal to purchase those items in a transaction. The point of sale terminal may be staffed with an operator such as a cashier who is a person employed by the store to assist the customer in completing the sales transaction. In some cases, retail establishments have implemented self-checkout point of sale terminals in which the customer is the operator and scans his items for purchase. In either case, the operator typically places items for purchase on a counter, conveyor belt or other item input area.
Point of sale terminals typically include a scanning device such as a laser or optical scanner system that operates to identify a Uniform Product Code (UPC) label or bar code affixed to each item that the customer desires to purchase. The laser scanner is usually a peripheral device coupled to a computer that is part of the POS terminal.
To scan an item, an operator picks up each item, one by one, from the item input area such as a conveyor and passes each item over a scanning area such as glass window built into the counter or checkout area to allow the laser scanner to detect the UPC code. After the point of sale computer identifies the UPC code of an item, the point-of-sale scanning terminal performs a lookup in a database to determine the price and identity of the scanned item. Alternatively, in every case where the operator can scan the item, the operator may likewise enter the UPC or product identification code into the terminal manually or through an automatic product identification device such as an RFID reader.
As the operator (such as an store employee or the customer) scans or enters each item for purchase, one by one, the point of sale terminal maintains an accumulated total purchase price for all of the items in the transaction. For each item that an operator successfully scans or enters, the point of sale terminal typically makes a beeping noise or tone to indicate to the operator that the item has been scanned by the point of sale terminal and, in response, the operator places the item into an item output area such as a downstream conveyor belt or other area for retrieval of the items by the customer or for bagging of the items into a shopping bag or other item carrier.
As well known, after all items in the transaction are scanned in this manner, the operator indicates to the point of sale terminal that the scanning process is complete and the point of sale terminal displays a total purchase price to the customer who then pays the store for the items purchased in that transaction.
These conventional systems that provide for purchase of items using an automated item identification systems such as a scanner suffer from a variety of deficiencies. In particular, operation of such systems can be compromised, either knowingly or unknowingly, by an operator in a manner that allows a customer to receive possession of one or more items without paying for them. For example, such scanning systems are susceptible to “pass-throughs,” also know as “sweethearting” in which an operator purposefully or accidentally fails to scan an item as that item moves through the transaction area for proper scanning. In such cases, the POS system never detects the un-scanned item and the item is thus never totaled into the purchase price. Thus, the customer can receive one or more items for free. Retail chains lose millions of dollars a year due to operator error or fraudulent activity of this nature.
In a non-fraudulent example, an operator may unknowingly pass an item through the scanning area during a transaction and place the item into the item output area such as a downstream conveyor belt, but no scan of the item took place. It is possible that the operator was not paying close attention and did not notice (or did not care) that the scanner failed to beep during scanning of an item.
As an example of “sweethearting” that represents fraud on the retail establishment, an operator assists a customer who is personally known to the operator (e.g. a friend or conspirator of the operator). The scan operator intentionally passes the item over a scan window without the item being detected by the scanner. Scan avoidance can occur in self-checkout line as well.
One way to prevent proper scanning is to cover or block the UPC label as it is passes by the scanner's detection window. In such a situation, the item is included with other items that may or may not have also been scanned, and the customer or operator continues along with a transaction as if the item was properly scanned.
After the operator processes all items in the transaction, either via actual scanning which is often done for the less expensive items to make the transaction look legitimate to anyone who may be watching, or via sweethearting in which case the item not scanned is grouped with items that appear to have be scanned, the customer pays the operator a purchase price reflecting only the sum total of the scanned items. After paying, the customer leaves the store with all items, having only paid for those items that were properly scanned or entered into the POS system.
In another fraudulent example known as label switching, the operator causes the POS system to scan an item that is different that the item being passed through the scanning area during the transaction. In such cases, a customer or operator may replace a UPC label of an original and often expensive item with a UPC label for another less expensive item. In such cases, a scan takes place but the wrong item is identified by the POS system. In this manner, the system will scan the item for a price that is substantially lower that the value of the item received by the customer.
Security system designers have attempted to develop conventional techniques for detecting fraudulent or accidental operator error in use of POS terminals. The conventional systems in the field of detection of pass-through and sweehearting provide for the detection of abnormally long “scan-gaps”. A “scan-gap” is the amount of time between consecutive scans at the point of sale terminal. When an item is passed through a scanner region without scanning, the scan-gap increases until the next scan. By comparing the scan-gaps between scanned items of a transaction versus the average scan-gap for a given employee operator, the conventional scan-gap method seeks to identify incidents when an item has bypassed the scanner without being scanned.
The conventional scan-gap detection method is widely regarded to be impractical, as scan-gaps have been found to be a “noisy” measure at best. This is due to the fact that perfectly legitimate scan-gaps may vary widely due to delays such as those caused by weighing of produce, manual entry of unlabeled or un-scannable goods, and rescanning of items that did not get scanned on the first pass. As a result, scan-gaps are not a dependable metric for determining improper activity. Thus, conventional systems that attempt to use scan gaps as a method for detecting fraudulent activity are prone to problems.
Other conventional systems include a surveillance camera to record an in-person sales transaction on video. In such an instance, the video can be reviewed at a later time in the store to determine whether there were any scan errors associated with a particular sales transaction.
Buying items in retail establishments has traditionally taken place at a checkout counter, where an employee, the “cashier,” would take inventory of the items to be purchased and record them in the point of sale computer system. Various devices could be used to facilitate this task, such as making use of a flatbed barcode scanner or handheld barcode reader.
However, retailers are increasingly offering various other methods for purchasing items. For example, many of these involve the customer taking inventory of, or transacting, items for purchase, entering them into a point of sale or other device, and then paying for the items, without the help of store personnel.
As discussed above, one such innovation in the retail sales industry is “mobile-checkout” systems. Via mobile-checkout system, the customer uses a hand-held device to take inventory of purchased items as the customer goes about selecting items from store shelves. Retail items can be scanned between a time of selecting an retail item off a shelf and placing the retail item in a respective item carrier. This is beneficial because the inventorying or transacting of items to be purchased occurs during the shopping phase, reducing the time spent checking out and paying. The handheld device can be a retailer-provided device or, increasingly commonly, through the use of a customer's smart phone or tablet.